Law Commons^™

A Poll Tax By Another Name: Considering The Constitutionality Of Conditioning Naturalization And The “Right To Have Rights” On An Ability To Pay, John Harland Giammatteo

Journal Articles

Permanent residents must naturalize to enjoy full access to constitutional rights, particularly the right to vote. However, new regulations from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), finalized in early August and originally slated to go into effect one month before the 2020 election, would drastically increase the cost of naturalization, moving it out of reach for many otherwise-qualified permanent residents, while at the same time abolishing any meaningful fee waiver for low-income applicants. In doing so, USCIS has sought to condition naturalization and its attendant rights on an individual’s financial status. In this Essay, I juxtapose the new fee regulations …

Democratic Legitimacy Under Conditions Of Severely Depressed Voter Turnout, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Due to the present pandemic, it seems increasingly likely that the 2020 general election in November will be held under conditions of unprecedented downward pressure on voter turnout. The possibility of severely depressed turnout for a highly consequentialpresidential election raises troubling questions of democratic legitimacy. Although voter turnout in the United States has historically been poor, low turnout is not usually thought to threaten the legitimacy of electoral processes when it results from voluntary abstention and is distributed unsystematically. Conversely, electoral legitimacy is often considered at risk when nonvoting is involuntary, especially when obstacles to voting fall systematically on specific …

Lessons From A Journey Through State Subnational Constitutional Law, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Before Loving: The Lost Origins Of The Right To Marry, Michael Boucai

Journal Articles

For almost two centuries of this nation’s history, the basic contours of the fundamental right to marry were fairly clear as a matter of natural, not constitutional, law. The right encompassed marriage’s essential characteristics: onjugality and contract, portability and permanence. This Article defines those four dimensions of the natural right to marry and describes their reflections and contradictions in positive law prior to Loving v. Virginia (1967). In that landmark case, the Supreme Court enforced a constitutional “freedom to marry” just when marriage’s definitive attributes were on the brink of legal collapse. Not only did wedlock proceed in Loving’s wake …

Invisible Article Iii Delinquency: History, Mystery, And Concerns About "Federal Juvenile Courts", Mae C. Quinn, Levi T. Bradford

Journal Articles

This essay is the second in a two-part series focused on our nation’s invisible juvenile justice system—one that operates under the legal radar as part of the U.S. Constitution’s Article III federal district court system.1 The first publication, Article III Adultification of Kids: History, Mystery, and Troubling Implications of Federal Youth Transfers, 2 examined the little-known practice of prosecuting children as adults in federal courts. This paper will look at the related phenomenon of juvenile delinquency matters that are filed and pursued in our nation’s federal court system.3 To date, most scholarship evaluating youth prosecution has focused on our country’s …

Religious Accommodation, The Establishment Clause, And Third-Party Harm, Mark Storslee

Journal Articles

In the wake of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, religious accommodation has become increasingly controversial. That controversy has given rise to a new legal theory gaining popularity among academics and possibly a few Supreme Court justices: the idea that the First Amendment's Establishment Clause condemns accommodations whenever they generate anything beyond a minimal cost for third parties.

The third-party thesis is appealing. But this Article argues that there are good reasons to believe it falls short as an interpretation of the Establishment Clause. In its place, the Article offers a new theory for understanding the relationship between costly accommodations and the …

Church Taxes And The Original Understanding Of The Establishment Clause, Mark Storslee

Journal Articles

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Everson v. Board of Education, it has been widely assumed that the Establishment Clause forbids government from 'aiding' or subsidizing religious activity, especially religious schools. This Article suggests that this reading of the Establishment Clause rests on a misunderstanding of Founding-era history, especially the history surrounding to church taxes. Contrary to popular belief, the decisive argument against those taxes was not an unqualified assertion that subsidizing religion was prohibited. Rather, the crucial argument was that church taxes were a coerced religious observance: a government-mandated sacrifice to God, a tithe. Understanding that argument helps …

The Constitutional Convention And Constitutional Change: A Revisionist History, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

How do we change the Federal Constitution? Article V tells us that we can amend the Constitution by calling a national convention to propose changes and then ratifying those proposals in state conventions. Conventions play this role because they represent the people in their sovereign capacity, as we learn when we read McCulloch v. Maryland.

What is not often discussed is that Article V itself contains another mechanism for constitutional change. In fact, Article V permits both conventions and leg-islatures to be used for amendment, and, as it happens, all but one of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have …

Against Fiduciary Constitutionalism, Samuel L. Bray, Paul Miller

Journal Articles

A growing body of scholarship draws connections between fiduciary law and the Constitution. In much of this literature, the Constitution is described as a fiduciary instrument that establishes fiduciary duties, not least for the President of the United States. This Article examines and critiques the claims of fiduciary constitutionalism. Although a range of arguments are made in this literature, there are common failings. Some of these involve a literalistic misreading of the works of leading political philosophers (e.g., Plato and Locke). Other failings involve fiduciary law—mistakes about how to identify fiduciary relationships, about the content and enforcement of fiduciary duties, …